How We Use All That Milk

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Ann Marie the Cheeseslave.

I mentioned to Pop that we were getting 3-1/2 gallons of milk from Lois lately. He said, “Wow, that’s a lot of milk.” It may be a lot of milk if you are just drinking it. But milk is so much more than a simple beverage!

Truth be told, we are actually milking two cows right now. Ginger freshened with a little bull calf late last month and is producing 4-1/2 gallons a day, give or take a quart. That brings our daily average to 8 gallons a day. Yes, that is a lot of milk! But have no fear, it goes to good use.

Here’s what we do with all that milk…

We feed it!

Both Lois and Ginger have bull calves. Right now, 3 gallons every day are fed to the calves. We prefer to feed some milk to calves for at least the first 6 months of their lives. It seems to match the feeding habits of wild ruminants more closely.

Feeding the veal calf.

These calves are turning that milk into some tasty beef.

8 minus 3 leaves 5 gallons a day.

We drink it!

We have five children. Four of them consume food other than that produced my lactating. Between us, we drink about 1-1/2 gallons a day. Another 1/2 gallon a day is made into kefir.

5 minus 2 leaves 3 gallons a day.

We yog it!

The Powermeister and the children consume nearly 4 gallons of yogurt every week. I drink the kefir mostly.The daily yogurt consumption keeps everyone’s digestive tract coated with all those healthy lacto bacilli.

So yogurt-making uses about 1/2 gallon a day.

3 minus 1/2 leaves 2-1/2 gallons a day.

We cheese it!

Admittedly, we are cheese hounds. It runs in the family. My Great Grandfather was a cheese maker. I’ve made a variety of cheeses: Cottage, Feta, Mozzarella. The family loves my latest cheese success. It is so satisfying to make food the entire family loves!

Currently, four gallons of milk goes into cheese making each week. It takes roughly one gallon of milk to make one pound of cheese.

I know what you are thinking: that’s a lot of cheese to eat every week! Some of these cheeses are stored in the freezer or cheese fridge for later use, when the cows are producing less milk. We are currently eating about 2 pounds of cheese each week.

This is a bit more than 1/2 gallon of milk every day for cheese production.

2-1/2 minus 1/2 leaves 2 gallons a day.

We churn it!

The remaining 2 gallons is turned into butter and sour cream. Two gallons of milk gives us a quart of heavy cream for butter and 1/2 quart of lighter cream for coffee, ice cream, or any other purpose. We are not getting a full quart per gallon this time of year.

Getting ready to skim for butter.

Once churned, we produce nearly 4 pounds of butter each week. Since I always culture the cream for butter, it doubles as a sour cream known as creme fraiche .  We typically use between 2 and 3 pounds of butter a week with the extra pound stored in the freezer for future use. Butter is the primary fat we use for cooking and baking.

What about the milk by products?

There are many useful by products in all this home milk processing:

• Skim Milk – sometimes I make cottage cheese with the skim milk. But more often, it is put into plastic buckets to ferment for feeding to pigs and chickens. Even the dogs get their fair share of the skim milk. This fermented skim milk, or clabber, provides protein and lacto bacilli that keep our animals healthy and in good production
• Buttermilk – with 4 pounds of butter comes nearly 2 gallons of buttermilk each week. I use about 1/2 gallon per week for various breads. The rest is added to the bucket for the animals.
• Whey – 4 gallons a week from 4 pounds of cheese! Wow! Fortunately, the pigs love the stuff. I save a pint back every now and again for making sauerkraut and other fermented goodies. The whey can also be used as a cooking liquid but I prefer to use homemade bone broth.

What is the cost of all this dairy goodness?

To get an idea of how much this would cost if we didn’t have a cow, using the cost of standard dairy products (that are pasteurized, homogenized, and produced by factory farms), here’s a breakdown:

• 1-1/2 gallons of liquid milk @ $3.50/gallon = $5.25 per day
• 1/2 gallon of kefir @ $3.00/quart = $6.00 per day
• 1/2 gallon of whole milk vanilla yogurt @ $2.50/quart = $5.00 per day
• 1/2 pound cheese @ $5.00/pound = $2.50 per day
• 1/2 pound butter @ $4.00/pound = $2.00 per day
• 1 pint cream @ $3.00/pint = $3.00 per day
• 1/2 gallon of buttermilk @ $3.00/quart = $6.00 per week

That is more than $700 per month in dairy products if we were buying from the grocery store. And the truth is that the dairy products we produce ourselves are of a higher quality than that in the grocery store. I’ve not even accounted for this difference! That figure does not include the food value of the beef, pork, eggs, and chicken we produce with our home produced dairy by products either.

And we produce all this for under $350 per month, not including our labor. This cost of production figure is reduced if you have abundant pasture, which we do not at this time. Yes, there is a great deal of labor in producing your own dairy. But what glorious labor it is! Certainly better than working away from home all day to earn that $700 in inferior diary products.

The health benefits of the physical effort, the food itself, and the character building are priceless.

Thinking about your own cow?

So if you’ve ever considered getting your own family cow, don’t be intimidated by all that milk. You’ll be surprised how fast it gets used up! Before too long, you’ll be thinking about getting a second cow!

July 29th, 2009